{"id":27182,"date":"2020-05-31T11:34:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-31T15:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=27182"},"modified":"2020-05-29T23:46:20","modified_gmt":"2020-05-30T03:46:20","slug":"icloud-for-windows-creates-a-single-folder-with-44000-items","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/31\/icloud-for-windows-creates-a-single-folder-with-44000-items\/","title":{"rendered":"iCloud for Windows creates a single folder with 44,000 items"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Trigger Warning: A First World problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A recent example of software engineering from the best and brightest of Silicon Valley is iCloud for Windows version 11. Want to see the picture that you just took on your phone? It will be zapped automatically to \\Pictures\\iCloud Photos\\Photos &#8230; where it is mixed in with 44,000+ additional photos and videos that you&#8217;ve taken since 2014 (thumbnails only, which load slowly even with a 1 Gbit fiber connection).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yes, a single flat directory of however many thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of photos and videos that you&#8217;ve ever taken. Even worse, the software no longer converts from Apple&#8217;s unconventional choice of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/High_Efficiency_Image_File_Format\">HEIC<\/a> to JPEG. Except that if you edit the photo on the device, e.g., because the orientation sensor got it wrong, the corrected version comes through as a JPEG.  So now you&#8217;ve got a directory with a mixture of HEIC and JPEG files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Is there any way to change this behavior? The 10.x version of iCloud would take the HEIC files captured by the phone, convert them to JPEG, and actually download them into a \\Pictures\\iCloud Photos\\Downloads<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Stylish Macintosh users: does it work the same way on the Mac? One enormous flat folder with every photo that you&#8217;ve ever taken?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(Maybe Apple is just leading the way into a HEIC future? Apparently not. The Apple-brand silicone case for the iPhone 11 Pro Max failed and I tried to send them a picture of the failure so they&#8217;d send me a replacement. Apple support has a web-based system for uploading &#8220;files&#8221;. If you try to upload a photo that you took with Apple&#8217;s own device, from Apple&#8217;s own browser (Safari), into Apple&#8217;s own server, it fails with no further explanation. If you try to do it from Windows, you get the same unexplained failure. If you convert the HEIC to JPEG on Windows and then upload&#8230; it works.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Trigger Warning: A First World problem. A recent example of software engineering from the best and brightest of Silicon Valley is iCloud for Windows version 11. Want to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-nerdism"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>iCloud for Windows creates a single folder with 44,000 items - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/31\/icloud-for-windows-creates-a-single-folder-with-44000-items\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"iCloud for Windows creates a single folder with 44,000 items - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Trigger Warning: A First World problem. 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